R. Salvatore - The Sword of Bedwyr

About seventy steps up, Luthien pulled up short and turned to regard Oliver, who was distracted as he continued to coil the line of his magical grapnel. Luthien bade him to hold a moment and listen carefully.

They heard chanting not so far ahead on the winding stair.

Luthien dove flat to the stone and tried to pull Oliver down behind him. Before the startled halfling could react, there came a rapid series of explosions rocketing down the stairs, a bolt of lightning ricocheting off the stone. It sizzled past—Luthien felt its tingling sting along his backbone—and then it was gone. Luthien looked up, expecting to find Oliver’s blackened body.

The halfling was still standing, trying to straighten his dishevelled hat and fix the broken orange feather.

“You know,” he said nonchalantly, “sometimes is not so bad to be short.”

Luthien jumped up and on they ran, the young Bedwyr leaping two stairs at a time, trying to get at the duke before he could cause more mischief.

Luthien could not ignore the deep gouges in the stone wall at every point where the bolt had struck, and he wondered then what in the world he was doing. How had it come to this? How was it that he, the son of the eorl of Bedwydrin, was now chasing a wizard-duke up the tallest spire of Eriador’s greatest building?

He shook his head and charged on, without a clue.

Around the endless spiral, the young Bedwyr’s eyes widened in surprise and terror, and he ducked, crying out as a heavy ax chipped the stone above his head. Two cyclopians blocked the stairs, one behind the other.

Luthien pressed quickly with his sword, but the cyclopian had a large shield and the advantage of the higher ground, and the young Bedwyr had little to hit at. More dangerous was the cyclopian’s ax, chopping down whenever Luthien got too near, forcing him back on his heels, driving him back down the stairs.

“Fight through!” Oliver cried behind him. “We must get to the wizard-type before he can prepare another surprise!”

Easier said than done, Luthien knew, for he could not offer any solid attacks against his burly and well-protected foe. On even ground, he and Oliver would already have dispatched the two cyclopians, but in the stair, it seemed utterly hopeless to Luthien.

He was even considering turning back, joining the ruckus in the nave, where he and Oliver could at least do some good.

An arrow skipped off the wall above Luthien’s head, angled upward. The cyclopian, shield down low to block the continuing sword blows, caught it full in the chest and staggered backward.

Up came the brute’s shield reflexively; Luthien didn’t miss the opportunity to thrust his sword into the cyclopian’s knee. The brute fell back on the stairs, helpless, and the second cyclopian promptly took flight.

Oliver’s flying dagger got the other monster in the back, two steps up.

Luthien had finished off the first cyclopian and the second turned with a howl—just in time to catch a second rebounding arrow.

Luthien and Oliver figured it out as Siobhan came around the bend behind them.

“Run on!” Oliver bade Luthien, knowing that the lovesick young man would likely stop and make sweet eyes at their rescuer for eternity. To Luthien’s credit, he was already in motion, bounding past the fallen brutes and up the winding stair. “We must get to the wizard-type . . .”

“Before he can prepare another surprise!” Luthien finished for him.

They put two hundred steps behind them, and Luthien’s legs ached and felt as though they would buckle beneath him. He paused for a moment and turned to regard his halfling friend.

“If we wait, the wizard-type will have a big boom waiting for us, I am sure,” Oliver said, brushing the thick wig hair back from his face.

Luthien tilted his bead back and took a deep breath, then ran on.

They put another hundred steps behind them and then saw the unmistakable glow of daylight. They came to a landing, then up five more stairs to the very roof of the tower, a circular space perhaps twenty-five feet in diameter that was enclosed by a low battlement.

Across from them stood Duke Morkney, laughing wildly, his voice changing, growing deeper, more guttural and more ominous. Luthien leaped to the platform, but skidded to a quick stop and looked on in horror as the duke’s body lurched violently, began twisting and bulging.

And growing.

Morkney’s skin became darker and hardened to layered scales along his arms and neck. His head bulged weirdly, growing great fangs and a forked and flicking tongue. Soon Morkney’s face resembled that of a giant snake, and great curving horns grew out from the top of his head. His red robes seemed a short skirt by then, for he was twice his original height, and his chest, so skinny and weak before, was now massive, stretching his previously voluminous robes to their limits. Long and powerful arms reached out of those sleeves, clawed fingers raking the air as the duke continued his obviously agonizing transformation.

Drool dripped off the front of the serpentine face, sizzling like acid as it hit the stone between the monster’s three-clawed feet where Morkney’s boots lay in tatters. With a shrug, the beast brushed free of the red robe, great leathery wings unfolding behind it, its black flesh and scales smoking with the heat of the Abyss.

“Morkney,” Luthien whispered.

“I do not think so,” Oliver replied. “Perhaps we should go back down.”

“I am Morkney no more,” the beast proclaimed. “Gaze upon the might of Praehotec and be afraid!”

“Praehotec?” Luthien whispered, and he was indeed afraid.

“A demon,” Oliver explained, gasping for breath—from more than the long run up the stairs, Luthien knew. “The clever wizard-type has lent his material body to a demon.”

“It is no worse than the dragon,” Luthien whispered, trying to calm Oliver and himself.

“We did not beat the dragon,” Oliver promptly reminded him.

The demon looked around, its breath steaming in the chill October air. “Ah,” it sighed. “So good to be in the world again! I will feast well upon you, and you, and upon a hundred others before Morkney finds the will to release me to the Abyss!”

Luthien didn’t doubt the claim, not for a minute. He had seen giants as large as Praehotec, but nothing, not even Balthazar, had radiated an aura as powerful and as unspeakably evil. How many people had this demon eaten? Luthien wondered, and he shuddered, not wanting to know the answer.

He heard movement on the steps behind him and glanced back just in time to see Siobhan come up onto the lower landing, bow in hand.

Luthien took a deep breath and steadied himself. In his love-stricken heart, it seemed as if the stakes had just been raised.

“Come with me, Oliver,” he said through gritted teeth, and he clutched his sword tightly, meaning to charge into the face of doom.

Before the halfling could even turn his unbelieving stare on his taller friend, Praehotec reached out a clawed hand and clenched its massive fist.

A tremendous wind came up suddenly from over the battlement to their left, assaulting the companions. At the same moment, Siobhan let fly her arrow, but the gust caught the flimsy bolt and tossed it harmlessly aside.

Luthien squinted and raised an arm defensively against the stinging wind, his cape and clothes whipping out to the right, buffeting Oliver. The halfling’s hat pulled free of his head; up it spiraled.

Instinctively, Oliver leaped up and caught it, dropping his rapier in the process, but then he was flying, too, bouncing head over heels in a soaring roll. As he came back upright, he went high into the air, right over the battlement. Stunned Oliver was fully a dozen feet out from the ledge when Praehotec’s snakelike face turned up into a leering grin and the demon released the wind.